Wall covers, such as wallpapers, have been limited by the tradeoff between preferred materials, including their aesthetic, and ease of installation. Wallpapers usually consist of a backing, ground coat, applied ink, and sometimes paste on the backing used to adhere the papers to the wall. Non-woven backings can be of ground wood, wood pulp, or wood pulp with synthetic material. Woven backings are those made of sturdy woven textiles such as drill. The woven backing is then coated and printed. The ground coat is the background color laid on the surface, which receives the printed pattern. Coatings or laminates are made of latex or vinyl (polyvinyl chloride) and render the paper durable and strippable. Ground coats also include additives that enhance the ease of handling, opacity, and drapability of the paper. Wallpapers are used in interior decoration to decorate the interior walls of domestic and public buildings. They are usually sold in rolls and are applied onto a wall using wallpaper paste, or other adhesive. Wallpapers can come plain as “lining paper” so that it can be painted over, or textured with a regular repeating pattern design, or with a single non-repeating large design carried over a set of sheets.
Wall tiles are usually made of clay, but other materials, like wood, natural stones or glass have been used. A tile is a thin object usually square or rectangular in shape. Modern materials have been used to make tiles. The most widely used due to its durability and waterproofness are modern vinyl tiles. These tiles are composed of colored polyvinyl chloride (PVC) chips formed into solid sheets of varying thicknesses (⅛″ is most common) by heat and pressure. These tiles are stuck to a wall by a thin layer of adhesive.
At one end of the spectrum, there are wall papers which can be printed with much elaborated patterns and arts and fairly easily installed, but cannot easily taken off, and the patterns and arts are 2-D flat. At the other end of the spectrum, there are marble tiled walls that cannot have elaborated patterns or arts, but they have the natural look and feel of a natural stone. Since marble is a natural stone, a wall of marble is every expensive, heavy, and requires construction skills, time, and good adhesive to build a marble wall. Since it is expensive, and labor intensive, it is not a good application for interchangeable walls. In between the two extremes, we have painted walls that are flat and usually have one solid color. The paint can be painted over so it is fairly easy to change the appearance of the painted walls.
If a builder wants walls that have elaborated patterns or natural material look, such as wood, he has to use the natural materials. Often the natural materials are expensive, so their applications for walls are very limited. Moreover, it takes time and skills to build such a wall, and, thus, it does not allow for quick changes of the patterns, which are essential in some applications.
The traditional linoleum or laminate wall tiles do not allow a wide range of decorative functionality, and, thus, limit users' applications of wall decor. Furthermore, wall mounting, replacing or removing, these tiles is not easy or non-skill task. Most of the surface coatings in the past have only been used on a floor, and, thus, repurposing them for wall applications requires some skill. These old materials also require extra tools and adhesive to adhere the materials to the surface of a wall.
For the above limitations, it is desirable to have a wall decor apparatus that can be easily and quickly applied to a wall surface, and allows for quick interchangeable designs or placement.